Book Review: God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor and the Search for Meaning (2021). Meghan O’Gieblyn.

Here as the subject for my last post and review for 2022 is one of the more unusual and challenging, yet fun books I’ve read this year. I discovered the author, Meghan O’Gieblyn, from reading her amusing advice column Cloud Support in Wired magazine, and decided she seemed somehow unusual and funny enough as a writer that I should read her latest book, God, Human, Animal, Machine.

I knew from the title that it had something to do with technology, A.I., and what it all means, but beyond that I didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, it was a strange delight, a series of chapter essays exploring the state of the world and the human condition in the midst of the advanced technologies that now shape our lives, as seen through her own life and story.

O’Gieblyn is a fascinating narrator. Born into and raised in a strict Christian fundamentalist family, and a committed believer throughout her youth, she attended a Bible college, where she dove deep into the history of Western and Christian philosophy. But somewhere along the way, she lost her religion, became an atheist and a non-believer, and later for a time a cocktail waitress with an addiction problem.

Despite this dramatic change in her beliefs and circumstances, she never lost her curiosity about the mysteries of existence. She became a writer about technology, which clearly fascinates her, but the issues which remain at the fore for her as a writer have to do with how we humans relate to and are affected by the marvelous things we invent. She also has a unique ability as a writer to probe these issues in essays by combining her own life experiences, emotional responses to people and situations she encounters, and her exhaustive knowledge of the history and ideas of philosophy.

The first chapter begins with a discussion of her experience with a small robotic dog which was provided to her temporarily by the manufacturer for research purposes. In a story that is both amusing and poignant, she talks about her first interactions with the robot dog, the uses to which she puts it, the role it takes on in her life, and the disquieting emotions she develops as she and the toy become more familiar with each other.

From this funny initial anecdote, she expands into a wider discussion of mind, consciousness, the capacity of artificial creations to have them, and what it means for us as humans to develop relationships with them. That discussion becomes quite deep and informative, as she contrasts and compares current ideas on these foundational human questions with those of many of the greatest philosophers throughout history.

I’ve never seriously studied philosophy, but this book was a crash course in the ideas of being, existence, mind, consciousness and the nature of reality, going back more than two thousand years. What made it particularly exciting was to realize the extent to which these same issues that surface with respect to artificial intelligence and robotics are the same existential questions that have been asked and pondered for millennia, before any of our current science and technology existed.

One particularly intriguing part of the book discusses the modern “trans-humanist” movement, now embraced by many Silicon Valley eminences and high-tech visionaries (or would-be visionaries), as first predicted by the futurist Ray Kurzweil. This is the notion that the ultimate end state for humanity, much to be desired, is to upload our personalities and memories to the cloud, and thereby attain immortality across the universe. A book I reviewed recently, Survival of the Richest, concerning the escape and survival fantasies of billionaires, documented the current state and wide popularity of this belief system among the very rich, the tech elites and some celebrities.

O’Gieblyn doesn’t put much stock in this movement or the likelihood of its success, but rather than simply skewering it, she brilliantly lays out her own observations of how closely the dreams, aims and objectives of the trans-humanists match the world view and goals of an earlier Christian apocalyptic movement, a thousand years ago. That one didn’t really work out either, as she gently points out.

Throughout the book, the author relates the ways that her questions about so many new technologies and areas of science – robots, artificial intelligence, quantum uncertainty, chatbots, life extension, the pandemic, and viruses – keep winding back to closely mirror the questions she struggled with in her days as a young Christian student, as she tried to understand and justify her existence, faith and beliefs. The book becomes the story of humanity’s eternal quest for meaning, in parallel with her own personal journey to find answers to the same questions, even though now surrounded by previously unimaginable and novel technologies.

The book is full of smart insights, tough questions, and her personal anecdotes and admissions, all skillfully tied together into an entertaining, challenging and thought-provoking package through her unassuming but expert narration. One of the ways she particularly excels is in her ability to connect topics that we might not have considered together before, and make compelling points in doing so. Who knew philosophy could be so entertaining, as well as so important to the moral and societal choices we face with today's technologies? Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back (2022). Jacob Ward.

As we approach the end of 2022, and the beginning of a new year, I’m posting my last two book reviews of this first year of my blog, which I began in February. This time of the year is usually a time for reflection, and for looking forward to next year’s projects and challenges, so it’s fitting that I’m choosing to review two books I’ve read recently that take a similar approach to evaluating aspects of the technology-steeped world in which we live.

In The Loop, NBC News Technology Correspondent Jacob Ward coins the term “the loop” to symbolize an iterative dynamic in our society and lives whereby artificial intelligence, and the computerized algorithms that increasingly influence and control many aspects of our modern lives, are in fact shrinking our capacity for personal choice and individual decision-making.

He begins with several chapters on recent research in behavioral psychology that have demonstrated the extent to which we as humans respond unconsciously to stimuli in our environment of which we aren’t even fully aware, and process information and uncertainty in the “reality” we are experiencing on two different levels, one of which is fast and impulsive, and thus prone to being influenced and misled by past experiences and beliefs, while the other is slower, more analytical and fact-based.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this two-level thinking process worked reasonably well to allow us to survive and prosper in the primitive world in which we evolved. System 1, the more automatic and frequently used one, allows us to make fast decisions and act immediately without a lot of thought, while System 2 allows us to apply slower, more “critical thinking” evaluation to difficult information and stimuli. The combination of the two allows for quick response to threats, but also the ability to grow, learn, and change.

Unfortunately, the invention of computer algorithms, based increasingly on vast quantities of data and attempts to build artificial intelligence to help us to make choices, has created a dangerous vulnerability for us. The businesses building these systems, Ward suggests, have studied the weaknesses of our human decision-making processes, and tailored their algorithms to exploit our emotions and impulses for the benefit of their bottom line, or in support of hidden political objectives or opinions, rather than to just help us make better decisions.

This is not a startling new revelation at this point. It’s common knowledge by now that smartphones were designed to use visual and aural rewards to keep us looking at them, and that social media’s algorithms were designed to maximize our emotional engagement with their feeds, by favoring and promoting posts that engender fear and anger, but Ward does an excellent job of demonstrating how the dynamic plays out in a variety of other different contexts and real-world situations.

For example, in one chapter, he describes how the online gaming industry has created incentives in their games that are specifically designed to create addiction in their users. Along the way, he introduces us to Nir Eyal, a Stanford MBA who wrote the popular book Hooked on how to build “habit-forming” products, which became a bible for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and Robert  Cialdini's classic work Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (previously reviewed here) on how to get people to do what you want.

Ward goes on to explore many problems in applying algorithms and artificial intelligence tools in areas such as education, therapy, policing and crime, and discusses troubling aspects of these attempts that surface repeatedly across the different application areas. 

He raises the fact that we often don’t know or understand how many of these algorithms arrive at their decisions. They're usually "black boxes", which we're expected (and often required) to accept as valid on face value, even though some have been challenged in court and ultimately found to be faulty or unreliable.  In many cases, these algorithms are protected by intellectual property rights, so that the individual negatively affected by them is explicitly barred from understanding the basis for the decision the algorithm rendered.

Ward also points out that organizations like courts, law enforcement agencies, insurance companies, credit agencies and banks often use computer algorithms to make life-altering decisions based on underlying big data which may reflect existing social biases and injustices. This process of using real data based on unfair conditions to make new unjust decisions simply perpetuates and reinforces the existing injustice, under the misleading appearance of the algorithm's "objectivity".

This is a wide-ranging and interesting exploration of how the alluring promise of machine intelligence and algorithms to enrich our lives has instead too often been used to limit our choices, and to manipulate us for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Recommended.

Podcast Review: Broken Record (Pushkin).

I’ve been hoping to write a review of a podcast for some time, but recently thought it would be best to write about a single episode that I found compelling in and of itself, rather than just endorsing a particular podcast series.

However, I haven’t found that much time for listening to a lot of podcasts lately (especially since I don’t commute to work anymore), and in general have found that when I do, the quality and my interest in the topics from episode to episode tends to vary a great deal within any given series, even with some of the best and most informative news series I’ve found, such as Ezra Klein’s The Ezra Klein Show (New York Times News), Chris Hayes’ Why Is This Happening? (MSNBC), and Rachel Maddow’s recent MSNBC podcast history, ULTRA, about an earlier radical right upsurge in our national history.

Despite my intention to focus on a single episode of a series for my first podcast review, then, I was surprised to realize that I am now most eager to share a review of an entire podcast series, rather than a single episode. Of course, it too has the same problem of inconsistent topics and variable interest-levels as any other series with many episodes, but at least with this one, it’s pretty easy to guess which episodes you want to hear just by looking at the list of people interviewed.

This podcast series from Pushkin, which I have listened to on a number of recent airline flights, is called Broken Record. It is a collaborative effort of the popular writer Malcolm Gladwell, the famous music producer Rick Rubin, longtime Canadian journalist and New York Times media critic Bruce Headlam, and NPR arts reporter and show producer Justin Richmond.

The format and purpose of the podcast series is very simple. In various combinations, one or several of the four hosts conduct in-depth, often fascinating personal interviews with individual popular musicians.

In many cases, the interviewer(s) bring not only their own extensive knowledge of the music and arts industries and communities, the work of the artist being interviewed, and their own individual expertise and enthusiasm to bear, but also sometimes personal relationships, shared history or real friendships with the artists, which shapes the tone of the interview and the questions they ask.

This is particularly evident in interviews conducted by Rick Rubin, whose wide-ranging career in music production has put him in the studio at some point, working with many of the major artists he now interviews. I previously reviewed McCartney 3-2-1, a video documentary of Rubin interviewing Paul McCartney in a spare and darkened recording studio. The Broken Record podcast interviews he conducts have a very similar flavor, without the video aspect, as he goes in-depth with the artists into the music creation process, the history, the stories and the emotions of the musicians when they were creating their epic tunes.

Rubin also appears prominently in Somewhere You Feel Free, the Tom Petty YouTube documentary I just reviewed this morning, both as a contemporary commentator and also in the archival films from the Wildflower recording sessions era, in which he was present in his role as a music producer. He’s really like the Forrest Gump of music producers of our times, because of the vast range of the types of successful music and musicians he’s recorded and produced, which makes him an outstanding and well-informed interviewer for these sorts of conversations.

Of course, Malcolm Gladwell is also a skilled and often-intriguing podcast host and conversationalist. He has his own long-running podcast on Pushkin, Revisionist History, in which he uses the same style of counter-intuitive thinking and probing common to his bestselling books to re-examine major historical situations that we all think we understand, but maybe don’t. He is also a big fan of music, culture and the arts, so his enthusiasm and constant curiosity shine through in his Broken Record interviews.

Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond are less well known to a mass audience than Gladwell and Rubin, but they also prove to be smart, enthusiastic music fans with great interviewing skills and the ability to relate easily to their subjects. In other words, it’s an all-star team of hosts.

If this sounds appealing, I suggest you find the series wherever you get your podcasts, and then peruse the episode list going back several years, to see which of your favorite musicians and artists have been interviewed.

One nice thing about this podcast is that the recency of the interviews isn’t nearly as important as it would be, for example, with a current-events or news-related podcast. You can listen to interviews from six months or two years ago, and they’re still fascinating even now, particularly since the conversations are frequently retrospective and historical in nature. These podcasts will hold up and remain interesting for a long time.

The thing I like the most about the series and the interviews is the nature of the discussions. In all the ones I’ve heard, you feel like you’re listening in to a rich, informative and very friendly conversation between real down-to-earth people, discussing topics, music and histories that are very personal to them, although frequently part of legends, careers and lives lived in the glare of spotlights and their celebrity.

During the past few flights I’ve taken, I’ve heard lively and revealing interviews on Broken Record with Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Michael Stipe (lead singer of R.E.M.), Stevie Van Zandt (Bruce Springsteen’s friend, E Street Band guitarist and actor), and a particularly interesting conversation with blues guitarist, singer and songwriter Bonnie Raitt, which made all that otherwise monotonous airline flight time go by so much more quickly.

I had also first heard much of the news about the Tom Petty Wildflowers album anniversary re-release last year (with all the supplemental recordings, discussed in today’s other review) from an excellent interview on Broken Record. That episode also was conducted by Rick Rubin, proving that these podcasts can be an excellent source of breaking music news and trends in the industry as well as merely historical and retrospective pieces with aging stars.

There are so many more artists’ interviews in this podcast series’ archives, and they’re not just old-time Baby Boomer favorites either. There are plenty of musicians from the grunge era of the 1990s, the first two decades of the 2000s, rockers and rappers, folk singers and R&B artists. You can pick and choose whose stories you’d most like to hear, although I can almost guarantee that you’d be entertained by many of the podcasts, and would learn something new and interesting, even if the interview is with an artist you don’t know very much (or even anything) about.

This podcast series is an excellent way to learn more about popular music, and the musicians who create it, while enjoying listening in to pleasant, friendly and revealing conversations between gifted interviewers and the talented musical stars who are their subjects. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers (2021). YouTube Documentary.

Hello again! It’s not even Christmas yet, and already I’m back from my reluctant but much-appreciated breather and short break from The Memory Cache. It was refreshing to take a break, and spend more than a week in Hawai’i with family and friends, with the trade winds blowing, warm weather every day, and gorgeous ocean views everywhere.  I took a helicopter tour of Maui, saw a sea turtle underwater at close range with my mask and snorkel on, went to the aquarium, and appreciated my life and my closest loved ones. It was wonderful.

This has been a surprisingly active bounce-back year for travel in our family, after the past two years of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. In October, my wife and I took a trip back east for a wedding in the Cleveland area, and then on to several family visits on the east coast. One fortuitous benefit of the Ohio visit, of particular interest here since it is once again Rock and Roll Friday on this blog (the fourth Friday of each month) was that we were able to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where we’d never been before.

It's a lovely museum, perfect for a lifelong popular music fan like me, with exhibits covering the entire history of rock since the late 1940s, including pictures, clothing, various rock stars’ guitars and other artifacts, and many explanatory articles and posters. 

The featured display at the time was one about the Beatles, tied to the recent Peter Jackson documentary about the making of the Let It Be album in 1969 (previously reviewed here), along with many other exhibits of interest, as well as mock-studio space where visitors can try playing instruments, and rocking out with a couple of on-site cover band musicians. It was a really fun museum, and if you’re ever in Cleveland, I highly recommend it. 

 

While I was there, I also saw a large poster for a new YouTube documentary I’d not heard about called Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers. It’s a movie that was released more or less contemporaneously with last year’s release of the “missing” Wildflowers recordings made by Tom Petty and his collaborators, including members of the Heartbreakers, the noted music producer Rick Rubin, and other musical luminaries such as Ringo Starr (from the Beatles) and Carl Wilson (from the Beachboys).

The movie itself is not overly long at a run time of about an hour and a half. Most of it was pieced together from recently discovered 16-mm film shot during the period of the Wildflowers album recording sessions, with supplemental interviews (from both then and now) and candid conversations with some of the principals, especially Petty’s close friend, sometimes co-songwriter and lead guitarist Mike Campbell, Heartbreaker pianist Benmont Tench, Rick Rubin, Petty’s now-adult daughters, and a few other cameos.

Several people in the film claimed that Tom Petty believed that the Wildflowers solo album was his greatest work and accomplishment. That message was pushed throughout the movie, as it was in the promotions for the anniversary release in 2021 of all the supplemental recordings from that period. The film makes very clear that it was a time of major growth, change and transition for Petty, both as an artist and as a person, which had impacts on the sorts of sounds he created, and on the artists around him who contributed to the work from this period.

I’m not personally convinced that this album contained the greatest songs of Tom Petty’s long and prolific career as a songwriter and recording artist. I’ve always felt that the heavily acoustic guitar-based sound of these recordings, and the deeply personal, often somewhat somber and depressive lyrics, were not nearly as compelling or exciting as much of the other classic rock material of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

A perfect example of this is shown in the film, with the story of a short "side" recording session Petty did with the Heartbreakers while he was mostly focused on recording his own solo album. The session was needed to record two new songs for the band's last album for MCA (which was otherwise intended to be a greatest hits collection), before entering a new contract with Warner Brothers. 

One of the two new “filler songs” for this MCA-produced Greatest Hits album that Petty quickly wrote (and the full Heartbreakers band recorded) was “Last Dance with Mary Jane” – a monster hit and perennial crowd pleaser, which I believe will forever dwarf almost all of the songs on Wildflowers in popularity, except perhaps “You Wreck Me”.

Nevertheless, whatever you might think of the Wildflowers album and this stage of Tom Petty’s career and life, the movie is a fascinating, informal view into the personality, relationships, creative processes, and artistic development of one of the greatest rock stars ever, at this one particular point in the long arc of his career.  

If you are at all curious about how top musicians write and craft their songs, and how their emotional states, random events and collaborations with other musicians and recording engineers shape the outcomes of their efforts, this documentary is a fascinating and unvarnished view into the creative processes of one of the world’s favorite and most legendary popular musicians. It's also essential viewing for die-hard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers fans. Recommended.

Personal Note: Taking an End of the Year Breather . . .

Hello, dear readers. You probably noticed that there’s been a longer-than-usual break since the most recent new review was posted here at The Memory Cache (on December 1st). 

As I’ve mentioned before, my general goal is to publish at least two or three short reviews each week, but as I approach the first anniversary of this blog (in February), after writing and publishing 250 posts in the first ten months, I've realized that it’s not always possible for me to maintain that pace on my own without a break, while also preserving the quality of life I want.

Family activities and responsibilities, frequent travel, the gradual resumption of our social life after three years of pandemic, and my musical projects are all taking more of my time and attention away from reading new books, and watching new shows, then sitting down to write about the ones I enjoyed. 

I’m beginning to realize that as we (and I) come out of the total isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic years (a period which contained very few distractions, or other demands on my time), I sometimes will need short vacations to relax and recharge, and to take time for reflection and other priorities, away from my now much-fuller daily schedule.

At this time of year, fortunately, most of you presumably also have plenty of other things on your mind, and hopefully plans to spend time with families and friends over the holidays. With that in mind, I wanted to let you know that I will only be posting a few more reviews between now and the end of this year.

I expect to come back up to speed again in January. Until then, please continue to check in periodically to see what’s new. I’ll be looking forward to the next year of writing and publishing The Memory Cache blog for your continuing enjoyment and information in 2023.

Wishing you and your families happy holidays, and a very happy New Year. 

Book Review: Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath (2022). Bill Browder.

In 2015, Bill Browder, a young businessman and major Western investor in Russia during the early post-Soviet era, published a bestselling autobiography called Red Notice (previously reviewed here). It described how his harrowing experiences in Russia at the hands of the Putin authoritarian and kleptocratic government had led him to become the chief advocate for the passage of The Magnitsky Act by Congress.

The Magnitsky Act was named for one of Browder’s Russian lawyers and friends who had been murdered in jail by the Putin government after being falsely accused of various financial crimes committed by members of Putin’s own circle. The act gives the U.S. government the legal authority to freeze and confiscate the funds of human rights abusers, and has been used extensively against Russian oligarchs, members of the Putin government, and other autocrats of the post-Soviet world, most recently in connection with the illegal Russian war in Ukraine.

Browder’s new book Freezing Order is the excellent and heart-pounding true life sequel to the story he began in Red Notice seven years ago. Red Notice ended with him having successfully worked with Congressional leaders from both parties to enact the Magnitsky Act, which immediately put him at the top of Vladimir Putin’s enemies list. Freezing Order picks up the story with Browder’s next efforts to convince the leaders of other governments around the world to pass their own versions of the Magnitsky Act in their countries.

Since February, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, we have had an ongoing public demonstration of the types of terrorism and cold-blooded brutality that Vladimir Putin is willing and able to unleash against his enemies. But Browder has experienced it repeatedly in his own personal life, as close friends and associates were poisoned, imprisoned and murdered, and as he increasingly has had to dodge and counter personal attacks on himself, including disinformation campaigns, lawsuits, death threats, in absentia convictions in Russia for crimes falsely attributed to him, and Russian attempts to use Interpol and other dark operations to capture him and extradite him back to Russia.

In one of the most chilling personal accounts of the dangers posed by the presidency of Donald Trump, he recounts his fears of being arrested and shipped off to Russia by Trump when Putin proposed that very idea at the notorious 2017 Helsinki conference, as a “fair” response to the American indictment of twelve Russian agents by Robert Mueller. Browder also provides detailed accounts of his own relationship to and knowledge of numerous of the Russian bad actors eventually identified in the context of the strange Trump/Putin relationship and the Mueller investigation.

One of the most important points Browder makes is that Vladimir Putin loves money. In furtherance of those desires, Putin and his cronies for years have run sophisticated worldwide criminal operations to steal from their own people, confiscate the assets and proceeds of Russian companies under fraudulent pretexts, and then export and hide the vast amounts – Browder suggests over $1 trillion – via complex, sophisticated money laundering operations.

But as victims, journalists and western government investigators have increasingly exposed, and by use of Magnitsky Acts in many countries confiscated the fruits of this theft, Putin has felt increasingly threatened and frustrated by the outside world. Browder suggests that the growing effect of these confiscatory efforts against oligarchs and human rights abusers has played a large part in driving Putin to his desperate war on Ukraine, and helps explain many of the other signs he has displayed of his hatred for and fear of the West.

It would be challenging to write a spy thriller with more devious plot twists and turns, unexpected dangers, and covert murder and mayhem. But this is an inspiring real-life story, with a crusading human rights advocate fighting for truth and justice against a criminal tyrant, while trying to survive a relentless covert campaign to stop him at every turn. It’s gripping, informative and very relevant to the current historical and geopolitical situation. Highly recommended.